It may seem odd to be writing about abundance in January, but here we are in January, and that is just what I am doing.
This week's word appeared in the 1400s, coming to us through Middle English and Old French, thence from the Latin abundāns,
all meaning "full or overflowing". There are lovely synonyms for the
noun: affluence, bounty, fortune, plenty, plethora, profusion,
prosperity, riches, wealth. As adjectives, Roget offers us the
aforementioned "full and overflowing", as well as lavish, ample,
plentiful, copious, exuberant, rich, teeming, profuse, bountiful and
liberal.
We use the word abundance (or the adjective, abundant) in late summer
and early autumn as we
weed and reap and gather in, turn the earth for next year's sowing,
harvest the bounty of the season and store it for consumption when the snow flies.
Winter lies at the end of our labors but we try not to think of it at
all.
Winter's eyes are as ardent as those of spring, summer and autumn, but they
view the world differently, taking in frosted evergreens against the
clouds, the light
falling across old rail fences, deep blue shadows on snow, bleached and
tattered leaves dancing in the wind, the thousand-and-one worlds resting
easy
in glossy icicles down by the creek. When sunlight touches them,
the icicles are filled with blue sky and possibility, and they seem to
hold the whole world in their depths. Cloaked in white, the round
bales of hay abandoned in winter fields
are the currency of summer, not simply photo opportunities but eloquent
reminders of seasons passed. Each element cries out for attention, for
patient eyes and a recording lens, for recognition, remembrance and a
slender scrip of words, for connection, perhaps for love.
The long white season is about harvest and abundance too, but the
gathering is inward, the abundance quieter and sprinkled with questions.
Around this time of year, I always seem to find myself querying the shape of my
journeying, the slow passage across the eastern Ontario highlands with
camera and notebook in hand, the sheaves of images captured and
carefully archived, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing
the world. The
bright spirit with whom I did my wandering for so many years is no
longer beside me. Beau and I hold him in our
thoughts, and we go on.
Big life stuff, emotional ups and downs, questions and more
questions—all are a kind of harvesting too. There is not the slightest
chance
that I will ever capture even a scrap of the snowy wonder and
grandeur around me, and these days on the good dark earth are numbered,
but in the
warm darkness of my questions and my uncertainty, I gather everything
in and rejoice.
Abundance is tea and cookies with an old friend. It's a ramble in the
woods on snowshoes, a good book or three (or better still a towering stack) on the library table. It's a
cauldron of soup simmering on the back of the stove, a bowl of clove studded clementines on the sideboard, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on the sound system. Small things perhaps and not exciting, but they are good and comforting things in a time when greed, cruelty, sorrow and disease are ravaging the world.
May there be light and abundance in your own precious lives this year. May there be peace. May there be kindness.